TRIBAL FICTIONS: Inquiring cable mind wanted to know!

Don Lemon fashions an ask: For all we know, Don Lemon may be the world's nicest person.

If so, he'll have to settle for a tie. There are a lot of the world's nicest people. They're found all over the globe.

That said, Lemon received a bad break in recent years. Some years back, CNN moved him from his regular weekend afternoon spots into his current role as a weeknight prime-time anchor.

Given the wealth and fame involved, this sort of thing can have temporary unhelpful effects. This brings us to the discussion Lemon launched on Friday evening, November 16, during the 11 PM Eastern hour.

Midway through that hour, Lemon had already conducted one of his standard discussions concerning the rather obvious racism of pretty much everyone else.

Long ago and far away, Lemon used to get in trouble by adopting the less judgmental stance concerning the racial dispute of the day. That has changed since he's gone to prime time. In prime time, we'd say that he tends to err in the other direction.

Midway through that 11 PM hour, Lemon conducted a thoroughly pointless discussion of a thoroughly pointless remark which had been made, during a videotaped public meeting, by a relatively insignificant county commissioner in Leavenworth County, a not especially gigantic county in Kansas (population in 2010, 81,000).

The commissioner's comment had seemed rather odd. That said, it wasn't entirely clear that he had been referring to "race" in the black/white sense, based in part on similar odd remarks he'd made about gap-toothed people like himself in the distant, irrelevant past.

Still, it seemed to some that Commissioner Klemp had made an offenseive racial remark. By the current rules of the game, this meant that Charles Blow had to be called on the air to conduct an unsparing analysis of the racism of the relatively insignificant public official who had made the odd remark during the lightly-attended meeting.

By now, this is a thoroughly standard type of cable news tribal discussion. As it ended, Lemon teased his next topic. After a commercial break, he proceeded to fashion his ask in a clearer way:

LEMON (11/16/18): Yeah. Thank you both. I appreciate it. So we're going to take a closer look at women who voted for President Trump. Who are they? Why they support his policies? That's next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

LEMON: So, white women supported Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. He won 52 percent of their votes. Though when you look at all women including women of color, Hillary Clinton had more support. She got 54 percent. Now, a wave of women, white, black and brown are sweeping into office after the 2018 election.

Does Donald Trump still have the support of a majority of white women and if so, why is that? Let's talk about it.

Before the break, Lemon slightly misstated his topic. After the break, he more specifically fashioned his ask:

He wasn't going to ask about women in general who voted for Trump. He wanted to know why so many white women—52 percent, he said—had cast a vote for Candidate Trump back in 2016.

Why did white women vote for Trump? If we ignore the unfortunate effects of constantly slicing and dicing the population by ethnicity, gender and "race," that strikes us as an important question.

Trump lost the popular vote in 2016, but he got enough votes in enough places to squeeze into the White House. Why did those people vote for Trump? That strikes us as an extremely important question even though, in current tribal terms, we liberals are supposed to get angry when news orgs try to find out.

Why did people vote for Trump? We liberals are supposed to complain when journalists fashion this ask. That said, it's tribally fine to fashion this ask if you fashion it as Lemon did this night. First, a minor digression:

Why did white women vote for Trump! The analysts leaned forward at their cramped study carrels, happy and expectant.

You see, the analysts are young and inexperienced. When they heard Lemon voice this ask, they assumed he was going to interview a bunch of white women who voted for Trump and ask them why they did it!

That's how "raw" these youngsters are! Lemon had a more pleasing method, one which would serve the tribe:

LEMON (continuing directly): Here to discuss, Kirsten Powers, Alice Stewart and Stephanie Jones-Rogers. She is a professor of history at UC Berkeley and the author of "They Were Her Property."

Hello, one and all. This is a very important conversation. I'm sure it's going to stir up controversy in a number of different quarters. Be prepared for that. So thank you for joining us.

Kirsten, let me start with you. There's been a lot of talk about why white women support President Trump despite of or perhaps because of his policies and his tone. What's your take on this?

Yay yay yay yay yay yay yay! Before a single word had been spoken, Lemon told us he was sure that the discussion was going to stir up controversy.

He told us to buckle up for the outrage! This approach is big business on cable news, where heat-not-light is often the way to attract the numbers which justify the fat, undisclosed salaries of corporate stars like Lemon.

Already, the analysts' shoulders had started to slump when Lemon offered his pledge of plenty of controversy. Beyond that, though, would come the hard play:

Before any "white woman who voted for Trump" would get a chance to say why she did, Powers and the Cal professor would pre-explain that these women had done so because they were snarling racists!

Lemon started with Powers. For years, Powers has been one of the brightest liberal pundits in cable news, including during the many years when she did a weekly appearance on the Fox News Channel, her home base, with Mr. O—Bill O'Reilly.

Powers fled Fox in the aftermath of that channel's gruesome sex assault scandal, concerning which she had apparently heard nothing at all during her many years at the channel. Now she launched a long jargon- and cant-driven harangue about the motives of tens of millions of people she had never met.

For years, Powers had offered the best advice, not unlike Homer's Nestor. That said, she has adapted to the tribal scriptings now required of cable liberals. As she started, she established one point very fast:

POWERS (continuing directly): Well, I think there's a lot of different ways to look at this. I think one of the first things is that people will say that they support him for reasons other than his racist language, which we don't have time to go through, but there's all sorts of things starting from the launch of his campaign all the way up until the latest campaign, the way he demonized people trying to come to our country on the caravan.

And they'll say, "Well, I'm not racist, I just voted for him because I didn't like Hillary Clinton." And I just want to say that that's not—

That doesn't make you not racist. It actually makes you racist. If you support somebody who does racist things, that makes you racist. I just want to establish that.

Yay yay yay yay yay yay yay! As it's been written in tribal hymnals, Powers had quickly established the fact that the women in question were racist!

"If you support somebody who does racist things, that makes you racist," Powers true-believingly said.

Luckily, she'd never heard about the sexual assaults occurring at Fox when she kept supporting the program there. Otherwise, someone might think that, if you work with people who are committing sexual assaults, you might be an [INSERT BOMB] yourself!

Powers hadn't known anything about that when she was being overpaid at Fox. But now that she's being overpaid by CNN, she seems to know the tribal rules of the road.

What have they done with the real Kirsten Powers? As she continued, she sounded like an Onion parody of a college sophomore drowning in the less intelligent forms of "critical theory," at least as applied in this context:

POWERS (continuing directly): As for why white women do it, I think we have to recognize that white men are doing it as well, but I think sometimes we would hope that we would get better behavior from white women because white women are themselves oppressed, and that they would therefore be able to align themselves with other oppressed people.

But I think we have to remember that the white patriarchal system actually benefits white women in a lot of the ways and they're attached to white men who are benefiting from the system that was created by them, for them. And their fathers and their husbands and their brothers are benefiting from the system, and so they are also benefiting.

Did that come out of Powers' head, or out of a Waring blender?

As we've said, Powers was an extremely bright pundit for many years. But now, as Elliott said to E.T., "Look at what they've done to you!"

Lemon broke in at this point, then threw to the Cal professor. Please note:

Powers is a "white" woman who didn't vote for Trump. Jones-Rogers is a "black" woman who didn't vote for Trump.

On CNN, you ask the women who didn't vote for Trump to plumb the souls of the tens of millions of women who did. Jones-Rogers issued a mountain of script, then made a statistical mistake, which Lemon waved away:

LEMON: Stephanie, you're quoted in this Vox article as saying, "For centuries, white women have invested in white supremacy because their whiteness affords them a particular kind of power that their gender does not. Explain what you mean by that.

JONES-ROGERS: So, as a historian, I explore white women's economic investments in the institution of slavery. And what that has led me to understand is that there was this broader historical context that we need to keep in mind when we're looking at white women's voting patterns today, and as we look at their support, their overwhelming support of Donald Trump.

And so what I meant was that we tend to think of white women as primarily focusing on their gendered oppression, that because they are oppressed as women, that that oppression will allow for them to ally and to sympathize with other dispossessed and disempowered people in the nation. But my research actually shows that they long had a deep investment in white supremacy, and not only did they benefit from it, but they participated in its construction and its perpetuation, not just in the context of slavery or the colonial period but well after slavery was over.

LEMON: You said that it was overwhelming. It's 52 percent. It is a majority, but it's 52 percent. It's not overwhelming, but it is a majority.

JONES-ROGERS: Well, what I meant by "overwhelming" was emotionally overwhelming.

LEMON: Yeah. Got it. Got it.

Jones-Rogers said the same things Powers had said, with a few additions:

To Jones-Rogers, the voters in question aren't racist; they actually have "a deep investment in white supremacy," perhaps even in "the institution of slavery." She then talked away a silly statistical mistake, with Lemon helping out.

Why did roughly half of white women vote for Candidate Trump? According to the white woman who didn't vote for Trump, they did so because they're racist. According to the black woman who didn't vote for Trump, they did so because they're deeply invested in white supremacy.

Increasingly, this is the way Lemon plays. In the sense of the term employed by Professor Harari in Sapiens, he strongly tends to pleasure his viewers with hard-core tribal "fictions."

Now that the tribal groundwork had been laid, Lemon finally threw to a white woman who did vote for Trump. He spoke with CNN pundit Alice Stewart, whose values by now had been fully explained. Here's what Stewart said:

LEMON (continuing directly): Alice, why do you think that white women support President Trump? Do you think they identify more with being, as she said, white than they do with being female? She just said that.

STEWART: I think when we're talking about the political arena, voters, women and men, identify themselves as either Republican, Democrat, independent or whatever their political party. And I strongly disagree with the characterization that women are oppressed and by nature of that oppression they should naturally vote for another group of people that are oppressed. I think that's not that's just not how politics works.

I think, as a Republican or a Democrat or whatever your political leaning is, you should vote for people that represent those policies. I'm a Republican. I support this president. I voted for this president. I did so because of his policies. I do not agree with his tone and tenor.

Don, I've been on your show dozens and dozens of times discounting his behavior, his tone, his tactics, the things he as a about women, his denigrating women, and I don't tolerate that, but his policies are what I stand for.

[...]

Look, I worked really hard for a candidate that had the character befitting of this office. Unfortunately, he didn't win the will of the Republican Party to become the nominee and I supported Donald Trump's policies over Hillary Clinton's.

And let me just say this. Kirsten is a dear friend of mine, but I resent she says I'm racist because Donald Trump says racist things. I support this president because of his policies, and the things that he says that are disparaging and disgusting, which I've said many times, those don't represent me.

Stewart said she preferred Trump's policies! Where do they get this sh*t?

How weird! Stewart wouldn't even admit that she's a victim of gendered oppression! Hopelessly locked in this form of denial, she said she voted for Trump because she supported his policies, as opposed to Hillary Clinton's.

She also said that she resented her dear friend Kirsten calling her a racist. All across America, Donald J. Trump is still gaining votes for very similar reasons.

This was one of the dumbest discussions we've ever seen on cable. It's very, very hard to get dumber than Powers and Rogers-Jones were this night.

Not long ago, Lemon performed on the milder, more moderate side. Now, he authors "controversy" of this type on a pitifully regular basis.

This may be good for corporate ratings. How tribal fictions have changed!

One final word about this remark by Stewart: "I supported Donald Trump's policies over Hillary Clinton's."

Powers had started her oration by rejecting such ridiculous claims. We'll only add this:

Many people voted for Trump because Hillary Clinton had been demonized over the previous 25 years, as was Candidate Gore before her. People like Powers and Lemon never challenged this ugly, stupid, decades-long rhetorical war, which was largely conducted by the upper-end mainstream press—by their employers and friends.

Children are dead due to Powers' silence. We can only hope that these people have fully enjoyed all the cable news checks they've cashed.

Tomorrow: Toobin issues mea culpa; Maddow misstates RE McGahn

A final note on Stewart: She didn't say that her dear friend Powers was a misogynist because of all the years when she supported the assault regime over at Fox.

"All across America, Donald J. Trump is still gaining votes for very similar reasons."

This is demonstrably false. Trump has provided the Republicans with the largest loss of votes in the history of mid-terms, and also the lowest approval any of any president in history - and that approval continues to drop as Trump slides down to 38% this week.

I am saddened by the death of humor. Over-sensitivity has made jokes verboten. (Uh-oh. I used a German word; therefore I'm a Nazi!)

When I was young, the conservatives lacked humor. Liberals admired humorists, like Mort Sahl. Now many stand-up comics are unwilling to perform at colleges. E.g., see "Comedians Dump Campus Gigs: When Did Colleges Lose Their Sense of Humor?A new era of political correctness combined with social media is causing comedians to steer clear of edgy jokes — and university bookings"

Yes, there’s that one he tells about the Mueller probe being a Witch Hunt. Priceless! Oh, and climate change is a hoax. Stop it! Oh, and his crowd size, like his hands, and his intelligence, are the largest ever. Oh ho ho ho ho. And then, have you heard the one about pussy grabbing? OMG. Wait till you hear the one about Jeffrey Epstein...Hiyooooo!! And he’s a man of the people...my sides are hurting!!! Deutsche Bsnk, Putin. And wasn’t that a real gem, the funny way he shitted all over our military by staying home and pouting on Veteran’s Day? That might be the greatest joke he has ever told.

CNN quotes defenders of Klemp who refer to the term "master race" as a "poor choice of words." I once agreed with this POV but no longer. There was nothing wrong with this joke.

The people who object to various jokes and to various ordinary words are pernicious. They're using over-sensitivity to have power of the rest of us, to manipulate us. We shouldn't succumb to these asshats. We should use words and jokes in a normal, adult way and tell the over-sensitive crowd to go f--- themselves.

It starts with feelings of inferiority. When someone interprets as derogatory almost anything that is said about him or about groups with whom they identify, it is because the supposed offenses are an excuse for them to express their own hostility, low self esteem and frustrated need for power.

It wasn't even really a joke. It was more of a hello or something. He said "we are the master race" which everybody understood to mean "we white people" instead of what he apparently meant "we people with gaps in our teeth"

That's an odd belief (if it is serious, and probably it is not) but it does NOT make him any kind of white supremacist. The race hustlers, though, quickly wanted to lynch him as yet another example of a white person who is racist.

Omigod, now I have done it. I never should have used the word "lynch" regarding a white person who was not actually beaten and hanged.

I humbly apologize for my white skin and my y chromosome and my cis normativeness and my heterosexuality (such as it is), and for the fact that I am not quadripalegic and allegedly not mentally disabled (parts of the jury are still out on that) and for having the unmitigated gall to have been born in the USA.

605 it sucks for Democrats who lose elections to inane, carnival barking, reality show hosts. Conservatives are ridiculous, evil and crazy but liberals are certainly pussies with no guts. Just born f****** losers.

Yeah, and where were you when first a war hero and then a GQ-esque successful businessman lost to a half-black community organizer with a Kenyan father and a fake birth certificate and a Muslim name? The bullshit goes both ways.

To the original point, it is liberals, liberals are the ones that are putting up hissy-fits on college campuses and are overly and hypersensitive, calling everyone racist and sexists, scapegoating and crying like children, they will always lose in the end. They are in huge huge trouble in the future.

Yes, I guess I am confused. Who is the carnival barker when you say this: "To the guy the Republicans thought was a carnival barker. "?

Trump is a fool. Democrats are hypersensitive, self hating pussies and born losers. Obama didn't follow through and left the party in a shambles. Democrats lost an election not to a war hero or a successful businessman but to a carnival fool. All that shit is true.

No, all of that is true. Trump is a fool. Democrats are hypersensitive, self hating pussies and born losers. Obama didn't follow through and left the party in a shambles. Democrats lost an election not to a war hero or a successful businessman but to a carnival fool. All that shit is true.

Don Lemon, Charles Blow....now why would they think that there might be racism in America? Anyone? Lived experience perhaps? Family history? It’s baffling. Why should they have a voice, when that voice makes someone uncomfortable?

And a viewer can watch a show like this, and, despite Somerby’s low opinion of him/her, that viewer can say, “hmm...interesting. Let me mull it over. Might be bull crap” instead of “programming complete...must mindlessly agree with Lemon and his non-conservative guests”

"Many people voted for Trump because Hillary Clinton had been demonized over the previous 25 years" Nonsense. Clinton had, always has had, the full support of the Corporate Media (compare the nyt or wp or npr coverage of Sanders vs. their coverage of the Clinton vs. their coverage of the Trumpe-l'oeil). What "demonization" did they apply to the Clinton's joining them in support of Bush's Iraq obscenity? How much did they do during the campaign to remind their audience (ie., their victims) of the Clinton's glee at the torture-rape-murder of someone she had come to profess dislike for ("we came, we saw, he died"). There were more than sufficient reasons to vote against the Clinton. There were more than sufficient reasons to vote against the Trumpe-l'oeil. Many chose to do so by voting for electors pledged to the other. But neither could get more than a small minority of us to vote for itself, even as the lesser evil.

Agreed. Had the old psycho-witch Killary been treated by the establishment goebbelses fairly, she would've been shamed and humiliated to the point of never showing her face again, let alone running for president...

Hmm. Charter schools are a widespread reality all across the country, and have been for years. And how exactly have the achievement gaps changed? Dunno. Ask Somerby. (Hint: they haven’t. Not significantly anyway).

Black families are more dissatisfied with their neighborhood school options than other groups, and the more segregated the neighborhood, the more dissatisfied they are.

Those were two big takeaways highlighted in a recent Brookings Institute summary of a new survey by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The data provide strong background for the consistent Black support for charter schools.

Let’s be clear this isn’t because of some magic in the word “charter.” Many charters underserve and disserve Black families in the same way many district schools do, and in the way that society does. But given the fact that we tend to have lower-performing neighborhood schools, many of our families hustle for the best options they can access, with little care about the governance model. They just want a good school that treats them with respect, pretty simple.https://greatschoolvoices.org/2018/02/black-families-support-charter-schools-evidence-latest-survey/

@2:32 First of all, the achievement gaps have been shrinking a bit. More importantly, the key measurement is not all black children. It's only those who move from failing inner city schools into charter schools and voucher-supported private schools. Their parents believe they're a lot better off for the switch.

You must know that not all liberals oppose charter schools. Many send their kids to one. So, it’s a false objection you raise. Like Somerby, many want a “sensible” use of charters, one that doesn’t simultaneously undermine traditional public schools. How is that for an evil liberal doctrine?

@4:46 - in general, conservatives support charter schools much more than liberals do. And, the difference is even greater for education vouchers. E.g., the liberal Salon Magazine had an article entitled, Why charter schools have lost support from Democrats

I don’t want to get into a long conversation about this. Obviously, the point is, that charter schools are often used specifically to undermine traditional public schools. That’s precisely why I said a “sensible” use of charters is acceptable.

“She also said that she resented her dear friend Kirsten calling her a racist. All across America, Donald J. Trump is still gaining votes for very similar reasons.”

Let’s see: a Republican voter is not likely to vote for a Democrat anyway. So Somerby can’t be talking about them. Independent voters? They aren’t likely to resent a guest on Don Lemon calling a Republican a racist, when they themselves are not Republicans. Perhaps it’s a sympathy resentment vote, or solidarity with other definitely non-racist Republican voters. Maybe they’re racist themselves! How about non-voters? Again, not clear how a guest on Don Lemon will cause them to refuse to vote for a Democrat, (which they were most likely on the verge of doing!), and join the Trump Train, which is definitely not making blatantly racist appeals.

The logic is impeccable, Bob.

Oh, and, in case you hadn’t noticed, Democrats did make massive inroads into Republican strongholds this past midterms, so you might want to rethink your theory.

There's nothing stupid about people being pissed off at your 'race'-mongering zombie death-cult, dembot, and voting for Donald The Stable Genius because of it. On the contrary, it's the most obvious thing in the world. The only "drop dead stupid" here is you, I'm afraid.

These discussion are so stupid, because nobody ever bothers to point out that the women who voted for Trump, much like the men who voted for Trump (most of them) also voted for Romney, McCain, Bush, Dole, Bush Sr., Reagan, etc. Heck, some of them may be so old and nuts in their guts that they voted for Goldwater (see Louis Klemp)

Now, suddenly it is a great mystery to explain why these people would vote for Trump.

It did, however, surprise me that more women did NOT cross party lines the same way a few black people did in 2008. Political parties always hope that some category like gender or race is going to pick up votes for their candidate. It is perhaps how McCaskill and Heitkamp got elected in their otherwise conservative states. In my own legislative district Republicans once again nominated a guy I call "the great black hope". Twice now, though, this Republican has been defeated by a white guy, although he did defeat a white woman in 2014. Did he capture more liberal black votes than she did conservative female votes? This in spite of the fact that she was a Republican herself until 2008 and the seat she was running for had been held by a conservative Democrat for at least 20 years.

I might also note that Leavenworth is the 6th largest county in the state (albeit much smaller than the top 5 - Sedgwick, Johnson, Wyandotte, Shawnee and Douglas). Also that commissioner, whose term was set to expire in a month anyway was "forced" to resign.

Interesting about the remark. Perhaps Klemp meant that "people with gaps in their teeth" including the black woman he was talking to are "the master race". Whereas most people took the gap comment as a strange way of insulting her while being blind to the fact of the gap in his own teeth.

Poor Alice Stewart. She thinks that Republican voters voted for Trump because he was a Republican, with Republican policies and all. And then here comes Somerby and Mr T to gives us the standard Republican laundry list of resentment against liberals. Well, poor Alice can’t really acknowledge that, can she, because then she would have to admit that Republican voters have the mind of an angry adolescent, who would vote for a steaming pile of poo if it had an “R” beside its name, out of seething resentment for the libs. Doesn’t exactly do much to validate Alice’s take about thoughtful Republicans and all.

I do wish that Somerby could have a more nuanced discussion about race/racism and the discussion about race/racism. On the one hand, overplaying the race card and accusing large swaths of the electorate of racism is bad. But so is pretending, as Somerby seems to, that racism disappeared in 1955 and that liberals should never talk about it at all.

If Somerby’s intent is to look behind the curtain at the power that is pitting the two tribes against one another, then he is failing at that. He merely calls himself a member of one tribe, the liberals, and takes the conservative tribe’s view without critically examining it. The other tribe pushes a particular view of liberals that they use to influence their own tribe. Somerby never examines the way in which that side pushes its narrative about “liberals/identity politics.” The result of Somerby’s approach is evident in the way his commenters can never carry on a rational, civil discussion about the topic. The commentary is hijacked by triumphant right wingers who say “nyah Nyah, libs. Somerby’s got your number. You’re all despicable.” And they are essentially just following Somerby’s lead in that.

This blog is about the "musings on the mainstream "press corps" and the american discourse". The whole point is that the mainstream press corps must replace their reckless, monomaniacal "tribal fictions" which manifest as witch-hunts that label every discrepancy of their beliefs as matter of race with nuanced discussion - not the insignificant comment section here. In that way you and Somerby are asking for the same thing only he is asking for it where it matters and can make a difference. Your suggestion that there are liberals here trying to start a nuanced discussion about race is canard and a straw man and is one of a number of blatant misreadings you have made of what has been consistently and clearly written here.

So you are saying beside the tint of their skin all immigrants are incidental? If they were bleached white one thousand Guatemalans and one thousand Irish would be indistinguishable in their culture, education, and temperament.

The Democratic party's platform is anti white man, why should we vote to be subjugated or even imprisoned for imagined thought crimes.

I know, white people are just dying out anyway. Sure but importing millions of non white every year to hurry it up doesn't sit well with the still majority population of this country.